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Mark Trail, 2/13/19

Well, it’s finally happening: newspaper revenues are plummeting so much that they’re resorting to desperate measures. Starting this month, every comic strip in the paper is going to have to dedicate at least three strips a month to having the main characters grinning and saying how much they love comic strips, and implying that talking to other people about comic strips is a great way to pique their interest in you, sexually.

Mary Worth, 2/13/19

Boy, Toby’s been worried about the state of her marriage, but it turns out that all that happened was that Ian became so sexually obsessed with a student who had only shown passing interest in him that he couldn’t figure out what kind of grade to give her even though she had failed to do any of her classwork! I bet Toby feels pretty silly, now.

Funky Winkerbean, 2/13/19

“Ha ha, get it? It’s funny because he doesn’t remember words any more, because of the brain damage! It’s OK to laugh — he’s not following any of this! His brain is pudding, and someday soon mine will be too!”

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Mary Worth, 2/8/19

Oh, wow, looks like we’re finally learning the real message of this storyline. Jannie had her chance with Michael, but instead wasted her most reproductively fit years in a dangerous game of psychosexual manipulation with her older professor. That whole thing blew up in her face, so now she’s come running back to her handsome age-appropriate classmate, only to find out that in the intervening … what, like, a week, maybe? two weeks? … he’s formed a stable pair-bond and is off the market. The lesson is to nail down that MRS degree as soon as you can, ladies! You don’t want to get to graduation only to realize you’re doomed to be an old maid!

Mark Trail, 2/8/19

I’m pretty sure a clear sign a tween is blowing you off is when they ask to “trade email addresses,” since nobody born after 1999 has ever sent an email address in their life. Mara is about to change phone numbers and set her Instagram to private, while Rusty has several forlorn weeks of watching emails bounce back from mara_totally_real_address@hotmail.biz bounce back to him.

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The Phantom, 2/7/19

So I was roundly and correctly roasted last week for not being up on the Phantom lore and realizing that it’s Heloise who has a Great-Uncle Dave (a terrorism expert, natch), not Kadia. I may not know much about ancillary Phantom characters, but I do know about international diplomacy, enough to realize that giving teenagers cabinet positions and admiralships in order to spirit them out of the country and avoid talking to the police is pretty dodgy, and I also know enough about storytelling to know that it’s kind of weird to spend this much post-climax strip time talking about the mechanics of how President Luaga is spiriting Heloise and Kadia out of the country. Really, it’s only interesting to nerds who are curious about the details of Bangalla’s governance and external relations — and I cannot emphasize enough that I am very much one of those nerds. Why do you think President Luaga is doing this himself? Are these sorts of appointments exclusively made by the president in person, according to the Bangallan constitution? Or is Luaga just here on a lark because he’s kind of bored with the day to day of Bangallan governance, which, for the record, I as a nerd am also eager to learn more about?

Mary Worth, 2/7/19

I’m pretty sure that Mary Worth is the person that Toby spends the most time with, which is profoundly sad, for both of them really, but it’s clear here that at least it means she’s building up an immunity to Mary’s platitudes and has gotten to the point where she can now just ignore them altogether. “Don’t worry about how you appear. Just talk to him.” “When I do, the most important thing will be how I appear!” I’m not sure how long Mary will accept this state of affairs before she takes her meddling to the next level (hypnosis, binding court orders, etc.).

Rex Morgan, M.D., 2/7/19

You ever see one of those sentences that has been run through some kind of automatic translator and while grammatically correct makes no sense? In unrelated news, here’s today’s Rex Morgan, M.D.!